Go for the gold: What to Cook Right Now

April 18, 2022

Chris Simpson for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Sophia Pappas.

What to Cook Right Now

By Sam Sifton

Good morning. Eric Kim's latest "Eat" column in The New York Times Magazine takes on the pleasures of afternoon tea. He doesn't approach the ritual in the British sense, nor in a ceremonial one. A friend bangs through the door and he brews a pot of chamomile or burdock, then serves it over conversation, ideally with a slice of cake: "a perfectly contained moment, a pause from the outside world."

That's something I do roughly never, but Eric makes the experience sound so pleasant that I might give it a try this week. And I want to make his chamomile cake with strawberry icing (above) to accompany the cups. (I might make that for dessert, to follow a dinner of three-cup chicken. It's very pretty. Send me pictures of yours: foodeditor@nytimes.com.)

There's a lot I'm excited to be cooking this week. Slow-cooker chicken ragù with herbed ricotta, for instance, and stir-fried spicy asparagus. Also, Mississippi roast: I'll use a venison shoulder a buddy gave me a while back, which has been waiting in the freezer for just this occasion. And absolutely these bean and cheese enchiladas.

Perhaps I'll go off-road, too, and cook in the no-recipe recipe style. Maybe you'll join me? I'll give you the prompt: bulgogi-style tofu.

It's simple. Press some firm tofu to extract as much liquid as you can. Make a marinade of soy sauce, brown sugar, sesame oil, minced garlic, grated ginger, a spoonful of gochujang, a splash of neutral oil, some sliced scallions and toasted sesame seeds. Slice the tofu into thick squares, and slide them into the marinade. Let that sit — a half-hour works; a few hours works better. Then roast them on an oiled and foil-lined pan until they're crisp. Serve with bibb lettuce cups to wrap them in, with rice, kimchi and a dipping sauce of ssamjang and a little bit more gochujang thinned out with neutral oil and sherry vinegar. (If not, go sesame oil and ground white pepper.) That's a fine dinner.

There are thousands more actual recipes to consider awaiting you on New York Times Cooking, and further inspiration on our on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube channels. It's true that you need a subscription to access the recipes and to use our features and tools. Subscriptions are the fuel in our stoves. They allow us to keep cooking. I hope you'll consider, if you haven't already, subscribing today. Thank you.

We will in turn be standing by should anything go squirrelly while you're using the site and app. Just reach out to us at cookingcare@nytimes.com, and someone will get back to you.

Now, it's nothing to do with food and its preparation, but I'd like to steer you toward Maud Newtown's first book, "Ancestor Trouble," the begats of the Bible brought into shimmering, difficult light.

For T Magazine, Alwa Cooper spoke with the Ivory Coast artist Joana Choumali about her painting "The Return of the Swallows," which depicts a sunrise she experienced in Dakar, Senegal.

I liked Rosemary Hill's "Dining Room Radicals," in the London Review of Books, a review of Daisy Hay's "Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship In A Revolutionary Age."

Finally, some Spoon to play us off into the week, "Feels Alright." Keep that on repeat, and I'll be back on Wednesday.